Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the environmentalist and human rights campaigner Wangari Maathai.

Known these days as Africa's forest goddess for her pioneering work fighting soil erosion and

poverty across the continent, she's united her passion for the power of nature with a crusade for political justice.

Born the third of six children in the central highlands of Kenya,

the family home was a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity or running water.

Simple beginnings for someone who went on to be the first African female to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her Green Belt Movement, which through the decades has trained 30,000 women to

plant 30 million trees, is in itself remarkable, but that's only half the story.

A perilous personal fight against political dictatorship, corruption and prejudice is the other.

Every time you provide leadership, she says. Every time you speak out, you expect you may suffer for what you believe in. So Wangary Mathai, the suffering

has at times come perilously close to both you and your family. For now though, let's talk

about what you believe in. It is democracy, it is the

environment. Where did those beliefs germinate? I know that growing up in the

countryside green, fresh water, fast-flowing rivers, no poverty as we came to

know it later.

That image of pristine environment must have been instilled in my mind so that later

on when I saw the degrading environment I was able to see it where many other people could not see it.

And then I had this great opportunity of going to school when many girls were not going

to school when many girls were not going to school and eventually finding myself in the middle of America

studying in college and getting education that was not available to many girls and boys at that time in my part of the world.

...